Running through July 7 at SCI-Arc's downtown Los Angeles space, the show—part of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time series—highlights the pivotal role of the temporary gallery that Thom Mayne ran out of his home for a few weeks in the late 70s. Zago Architecture, the exhibition designers, wrapped the entry zone in skewed, blown-up reproductions of Morphosis' mock postage stamps – a clever riff on Graphic Wrap, one of the six spatial strategies the curators identified in the featured work, most notably Eric Owen Moss' Fun House. In the fall of 1979, Los Angeles’ first gallery for architecture came into
By Edwin Heathcote. London: Frances Lincoln, 2012, 160 pages, $20. This book is so petite and whimsical-looking you could easily mistake it for “bookshop candy”—those cutesy, little tomes perched around cash registers—but don’t be fooled. While this rambling meditation on the significance of home mixes plenty of wit and surprising factoids with occasional clichés, it also draws on such heavy-hitting intellectuals as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Ingmar Bergman, and Gaston Bachelard. The Meaning of Home grew from a series of essays its author, British journalist Edwin Heathcote, wrote as the Financial Times’ architecture critic, a position he has
The beachfront city of Santa Monica, California, with its stylishly laid-back restaurants and hotels, plus freeway access to downtown Los Angeles, may not seem the obvious place for affordable housing.
The 28th Street YMCA opened in Los Angeles in 1926 on an upbeat: the Spanish Colonial Revival building offered the African-American community a sparkling recreational facility with an indoor pool and affordable accommodations for young men who were migrating from other regions (and prevented by color barriers from staying at ordinary hotels).
As schools for students with autism move from makeshift or retrofitted quarters to new buildings tailored to their specific programs, architects and educators focus on what makes the best places for learning.
Back in 1975, when the Eden Institute was founded in a New Jersey church basement to serve children with autism, the disorder was considered relatively rare, then estimated at a nationwide rate of 1 in 10,000 births.
Photo courtesy UCLA Haiti will be the focus of Thom Mayne's Suprastudio in 2013-14. Five years ago, UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design (A.UD), took the bold step of replacing its post-professional, or Masters of Architecture II, curriculum with what it calls the Suprastudio: an intensive, yearlong, R+D collaboration, led by a single faculty member in partnership with leaders from the aerospace, automotive design, or entertainment industries. The idea was to embrace cutting-edge technologies and engage architecture’s changing profession in productive and inventive ways. Teaming with companies such as Toyota and Disney, A.UD gradually ramped up the program, offering
Housing Fit for 007: Architect-developer Jonathan Segal named his 29-unit apartment building 'The Q,' after James Bond's resident gadgeteer. The tricks used here, though, are subtler than a shoe dagger.
When architect-developer Jonathan Segal named one of his recent buildings “The Q,” he says he was looking for “the cool factor, the debonair suaveness” of James Bond.
November 2011 Five Los Angeles cultural institutions shed new light on mid-20th-century design efforts. Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980—a collaboration among 60 cultural institutions across Southern California—is a grand bazaar, as eclectic, wide-ranging, and uneven as the period of art it celebrates. Initiated by the Getty Foundation, which provided $10 million in grants, this effort engages venues of radically different scales and aspirations to focus on the evolution of the Los Angeles art scene in the decades after World War II. With nearly every institution in on the act—from major museums to university galleries—art takes on a fluid